Since the dawn of history, human beings have gazed into the sky and observed the star groups, giving them names. The movement of the stars in the sky, referred to as planets, has always intrigued mankind.
Interestingly, star gazing was something originally done by fortune tellers, but people began to record the position of the stars and constellations and their motion, and it gradually developed into a proper science.
Depictions of some of the earliest known constellations appear on the walls of Ancient Egyptian temples and tombs such as those on the ceiling of the Tomb of Seti I in the Valley of the Kings, Luxor. But the oldest, best preserved and most complete presentation of the Northern Hemisphere is that of the ceiling of the Temple of Dendera, built in Upper Egypt about 50 BC.
Many Greek scientists communicated with the Egyptian civilization and this led to Greek astronomy flourishing here, crowned by the works of the famous Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy, whose book “Al Magest” (literally meaning “The Greatest”) is a precious work of reference.
For 500 years following Ptolemy and the Greeks, the science of astronomy further advanced with the contribution of the Arab civilization and, Arab scientists became the masters of this science. Later, the Western renaissance carried on the good work.
Although the story of how the Greek astronomy passed to the Arab nation is comparatively well known, the history of its transformation by Islamic scholars and subsequent retransmission to the Latin West is only now starting to be written.
The many Arabic astronomers/scholars became famous in this field included Thabit Ibn Qurra, Al Khawarizmi, Ahmed Al-Farghani, Abdul Rahman Al-Sufi and Al-Battani to name but a few.
About 50 per cent of the stars on Western maps of the sky have transliterated Arabic names. This is clear evidence of the great influence of Arab Civilization in its glory days.
The astrolabe stands out as a great contribution of the Arab astronomers. Essentially, it is a two-dimensional model of the sky. The earliest existing astrolabe was by Nastulus in 315 AH (AD 927) and it is now one of the most valuable treasures on display at the Kuwait National Museum.
